Editorial

The opera Have A Good Day! is striking for its focus on something no other opera deals with: the working conditions of supermarket cashiers. Written by Vaiva Grainytė but conceived with her collaborators Lina Lapelytė and Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, the opera’s libretto is divided between characters representing different aspects of supermarket work as well as the drastically different personalities and temperaments that animate this division of labor. Yet another layer emerges in how the structure of the score itself reflects the subject matter by reproducing a division of labor among the librettist (Grainytė), composer (Lapelytė), and director (Barzdžiukaitė): music produced collaboratively, by design, typically needs to employ methods of separating tasks between different individuals. While this might seem obvious, the consequences of such organizing principles are not well understood, especially in terms of how they place limits on the artistic result from the outset.

Socially progressive ideas cannot be contained in a regressive form—a modernist principle familiar to readers of Walter Benjamin and Władysław Strzemiński. Left-wing modernist music followed the same tenet, which is why Cornelius Cardew could condemn John Cage:

Cage serves imperialism and will go under with imperialism. But is it true to say that his music bears no relation to the lives of the working or oppressed people? In a way such music does reflect the conditions under which people work, with the productive forces catastrophically out of step with the relations of production, and in doing so it intensifies our oppression.1

Cardew’s lectures and writings were filled with analyses of music that reproduced the exploitative relations of labor. In classic communist style, they also included self-criticism. This special issue of e-flux journal (a sequel to Issue 144 from April 2024, which I also guest-edited) includes a conversation with musician and composer Anton Lukoszevieze on Autumn ’60, one of Cardew’s compositions that Cardew himself condemned in his later period. The complex set of rules it is based on create a unique blend of limits and freedoms as well as relations within the performing ensemble.

Also in this issue, Sandra Skurvida shows a different aspect of Cage’s work—his attempts to construct constellations of human and inhuman powers. Skurvida focuses on aspects of Cage’s work that are rooted in the politics of anarchism, which Cardew still saw as harmful to the workers’ cause. Yet it was especially in Cage’s last pieces that his ability to think of labor outside the humanist worldview started to become apparent. Sezgin Boynik’s essay in the issue also considers musical propaganda that closely resembles the late activity of Cardew. Focusing on the antinomies of agit-punk developed by the Pop Group, Boynik shows how Mark Stewart’s project attempted to create a punk structure for conscious political work through form, lyrics, and methods of production.

The rise of open scores in the 1960s was part of an ideology of emancipating the performer to take creative license in interpreting cues offered by the composer. Yet this opening could also be understood as delegating more work to the performer, who now needed to step in and fill all the blanks in the score, as a composer might have done previously. One could argue that such a “liberation” simply relocated the burdens of production onto the workers, in accordance with the general logic of capitalism. After all, performing music is a form of labor, as exposed in the poems by Witold Wirpsza (1918–85) published here, based on photographs from “The Family of Man” exhibition. This conviction was also strong for another left-wing modernist composer, Luigi Nono, who made a striking comparison: “I’ve understood that there is no difference if I write a score or organise a strike. They are two aspects of the same thing. For me there is no longer any difference between music and politics.”2 How can a strike and a score be the same? A strike is a refusal of work and a score is an instruction for how to work. And yet labor is central to the existence of both.

The issue also features four musicians and composers reflecting on their own experiences with divisions of labor in performing and writing music. A conversation between Marianne Ritchey and Greg Stuart deals with the interpretation of assigned labor in the twentieth-century New Complexity school of composition. Sarah Hennies addresses questions of exploitation in classical music performance while showing how a score might be a tool for exploring new forms of relation based in mutual understanding. This is similarly important for trumpet player and composer Nate Wooley; his essay recounts his attempts to treat a score as a basis for anarchism-rooted (though not necessarily Cageian) social relations within the ensemble, where utopian scenarios might be realized. David Grubbs uses his experience performing an open score by Pauline Oliveros to show how a written document becomes a basis for creative unity ensured by a humble yet charismatic leader.

The issue opens with an opera and ends with opera. The last document is a synopsis of a stage musical performance by Liam Gillick based on his 1995 novel Erasmus Is Late. The period of the musical is vaguely determined by a meaningful moment: the rise of workers as a social class. The characters, even if historically marginal, represent tendencies in labor management, and the opera depicts the nonevent of their meeting by doing exactly what the opera is about: dividing the labor of performing liberalism.